BA, Swarthmore College. PhD, University of California, Berkeley. Areas of expertise include gender and sexuality, sexual economies, and labor. Sparks’ research examines how gendered and racialized fantasies of prostitution shape how sex work is regulated, stigmatized, and experienced by those who do it. Her work can be found in Disability Studies Quarterly, WSQ, Sex Work Today (2024), and Introducing the New Sexuality Studies (2022). Sparks is one of the 2025-2026 Scholars-in-Residence at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY, where she also serves on the executive committee of the board. She is currently working on a documentary about the history of professional dominatrixes in New York City. SLC, 2025–
Undergraduate Courses 2025-2026
Sociology
Labor and Its Disavowals
Open, Lecture—Fall
SOCI 2063
What counts as labor when most of the world’s value is extracted from bodies deemed invisible and illegal? What is the role of the labor movement as more and more people earn a living through arrangements that are not considered labor and are not protected by existing labor laws? As precarity further becomes a defining feature of contemporary life, the fantasy of labor as a source of stability (let alone mobility) is dissolving. In this course, we will approach the nature and limits of labor by way of its historical exclusions, including slavery, domestic work, and the informal/illegal work performed by whom Marx calls the lumpenproletariat. Rather than treating informal, unpaid, and illicit practices of survival as the exception, we will examine disavowed working arrangements as essential features of capitalism. We will begin the course with a critique of the humanism implicit in the ideology of work. We will trace this humanism from labor’s racialized and gendered exclusions to contemporary battles waged over an alleged antagonism between “labor” and “environment.” Topics will include the informal economies, the problem of consent at work, the wages for housework movement, globalization and the feminization of migration, prison labor and the afterlives of slavery, the imperial economies of artificial intelligence, natural resource extraction and the false divide between labor and environment, and antiwork politics and post-work imaginaries. Through this course, students will place ethnographic studies of labor in dialogue with Marxist theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, and the political writings of activist groups. Key authors will include Karl Marx, Angela Davis, Cedric Robinson, Silvia Federici, Kathi Weeks, Kathleen Millar, and Heather Berg.
Faculty
Queer Ethnographies
Intermediate, Seminar—Spring
SOCI 3258
Prerequisite: at least one course in the humanities or social sciences
This seminar will offer a critical introduction to the ethnographic study of queer life, examining how queerness is shaped and contested across cultural, national, and historical contexts. The cross-cultural perspective of this course illuminates the indeterminacy of the category “queer,” which then puts “universal” ideas of sex and gender into question. Here, queer performance art and drag emerge as two particularly dynamic sites where queer subjects parody and disidentify with fictions of identity. In this course, we will also explore the ways in which queerness shapes and is shaped by the politics of national belonging, citizenship, and neoliberal ideologies. We focus in particular on identity and rights-based gay activist movements that hinge on the stabilization and normalization of gay sexualities and trans identities, often to the exclusion of the most marginalized queer and trans people. This course will also include a critical examination of queer ethnographic methods as a way of understanding the base assumptions of ethnography. We will examine how queerness shapes the ethnographic method: How do queer ethnographers navigate their own queerness in relation to the field? How does queerness offer a critical framework through which to address the colonial and racial dynamics that subtend ethnographic fieldwork? How do queer theory and queer ethnography complicate and constitute one another? Course topics will include queer migration, queer performance, sexual economies, geographies of public sex, transnational queer activism, the intersections of neoliberalism and gay rights discourse, and homonormative citizenship. Course materials will include foundational and contemporary queer ethnographies, queer theory, memoir, and performance art. For conference work, students will conduct ethnographic fieldwork for the duration of the course. Ethnographic projects may focus on queer spaces and geographies, gay NGOs, queer activism, queer art and performance, Pride, and queer life on campus. This course is open to all students interested in queer studies, performance, ethnography, and the politics of sexuality and gender. Students should be prepared to undertake ethnographic observation, which includes regular visits to a field site, ethnographic note-taking, and analyzing fieldnotes.
Faculty
Sex, Race, and the Borders of Belonging
Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year
SOCI 3106
How do regimes of sexual governance delimit the possibilities of belonging? This seminar will explore how sex, race, and citizenship are produced and regulated through systems of law, biopolitical regimes, and cultural norms in the United States. Focusing on sexual labor and intimate economies, we will trace how discourses of morality, criminality, and deviance have been mobilized to control the movement and identification of racialized and gendered bodies. We will follow these dynamics from the colonial governance of sexual reproduction to contemporary debates over citizenship and transness. Drawing on interdisciplinary materials (critical theory, ethnography, and documentary film), students will study how the regulation of sexuality operates as a tool of state-making and social control and how this racial and sexual governance shapes everyday life. Themes include the colonial governance of reproduction, eugenics, biopolitics and state-making, sexual economies of slavery, trans citizenship, and the politics of queer identity. Across these themes, we will continually return to the alternative frameworks of belonging and border transgressions that marginalized communities practice as gestures of refusal. No prior coursework in sociology is required, but students should expect demanding readings and engaged discussions.